Price city grants Emery Telcom more time, continues building parade float

At the Price city council meeting on June 24, topics ranged from the city's parade float to Emery Telcom's efforts with expanding it's cable TV offerings.

Price city has recently constructed a parade float that can be utilized for a variety of parade events, and while the vehicle is nearing completion, it has come under scrutiny of the state, because it is unfit to pass road inspections. "We need to find a compromise, because if the float is unsafe, then we have many other things that are unsafe," said councilmember Jeanne McEvoy during the meeting. While the float is a motorized vehicle, the council does not believe it needs to pass state highway inspection because, they do not believe it will ever be used on the highway.

"As long as we have brakes and obvious things, (to make it safe) we should be alright," said city attorney Nick Sampinos. Eventually, the council decided that while some safety inspections might still be pending, it is safe to assume that the float should be fine if it is clearly classified for non highway use. "We want it safe, but we want a float," said council member Rick Davis.

The council decided that it was safe to finish the float in which the CEU welding department is contributing time to.

Emery Telcom CEO Brock Johansen was also present to present the council with the company's plans for operating a cable TV station, that is not under the former Precis Communications agreement. The council granted Emery Telcom an additional 45 days in which to work out some of the final details of the new cable system agreement.

Although extra time was granted to Emery Telcom, Johansen said during the meeting and again over the phone that he would like to see Price city ease some of the regulations that are currently in place for cable TV providers.

"Many of the provisions deal with the phones in that we can only talk to so many people and only for a certain amount of time,"said Johansen. His reasoning for the deregulation is that most of the provisions were put into place when cable companies had near monopolies over the TV system, which has changed with the introduction of cheap satellite providers.

"All of Emery County's cities made their regulations less strict," said Johansen, "the rest of Carbon County has implied that they will follow Price's example," he concluded.